The Trust branding story

The client

The Old Enfield Charitable Trust is a charity which serves the community of the Old Parish of Enfield. With the aid of grants, they aim to support families, individuals and community organisations in financial need. They manage Enfield Market which runs every Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Design tender

I was approached in mid July by The Trust and asked to tender for the branding and design of their work. The project entailed logo design and marketing material which was going to culminate in the relaunch of the Enfield Market on 1st October in time for British Food Fortnight. The main brief was that they wanted three logos.

The Old Enfield Charitable Trust: established to aid the community. They award grants and welcome donations

Enfield Market: There’s been a market in the square since 1303

The Market Place: The square that Enfield Market resides in. There will be different events hosted in it and The Trust want to promote it as the place to be.

All of the logos needed to work well together and independently. The only prerequisite of The Trust’s brief was that they wanted to include the Old Parish Boundary outline as a graphical element on their logo.

The time allocated to the tender was pretty tight so off I went with my pencil and paper to sketch up some ideas. Truth be told, I’m not much of a sketcher but I really didn’t want to go straight to the computer as then it might have been construed as being final designs – which they definitely weren’t. Pencil sketches are seen as draft that can be tweaked and changed easily. That’s what I wanted to get across.

This was one of my initial ideas that would be adopted for the final logos but in a slightly different format. Notice how badly I’ve drawn the bandstand in the Market Place? Looks like a child drew it but it got my idea across and I was promptly awarded the ‘contract’.

Branding

It’s important to note that branding is way more than just a logo. It represents the face of the business/organisation and makes you recognisable to customers. Your brand promises a certain standard of what your business is about to the general public. It communicates who you are. It encompasses how the entire marketing and promotional material is designed. It includes a colour palette, fonts used, how the logo is implemented, graphic elements and other things. Get it wrong and you could end up with an expensive (or cheap) logo that just doesn’t represent what you are about. The branding guidelines which I wrote for the Trust gives uniformity to their promotional material whilst still giving flexibility to design something strong and eye-catching.

Colours

The colour palette took a bit of time to get right. They’re loosely based on 1930s type colours so as to give the logos a bit of vintageness (after all the organisation has been around for over 500 years). But we also wanted them to be vibrant, interesting, instantly recognisable and distinctive. This is the primary colour palette but there’s also a secondary colour palette which has been designed to compliment the main ones. Oh, and I took the brave decision to delete black from the colour palette.

Typography

Again, we looked to the early 1900s for a sans serif (without curves) font. And it really did have to be a sans serif font as this was the popularity back in the day. The font chosen was Gill Sans which I have used off and on for the past 20 years.

Now, I don’t love Gill Sans in it’s entirety. I’m not that keen on the italicised versions and Gill Sans Ultra Bold is not an attractive font but light and regular are lovely. The Ultra weight is somewhat awkward and looks so different to it’s siblings and can only really be used in ALL CAPS successfully. That being said, typography is very subjective. There may be times when you want to use just one of the letters or glyphs (special characters) as a design element. Take a look at the image below for some of the ultra bold characters that I really love.

The Market House

The bandstand, commonly known as The Market House, is a prominent feature in all of the logos. It’s an instantly recognisable structure in Enfield Town and so it made perfect sense to use it. But it wasn’t the only graphic that was put forward to represent the House. I really loved the octagonal graphic (right) which I’d put forward to be used in conjunction with the actual Market House sketch. The Trust thought that it was too much to be used together and ultimately, (and I hate to say it) they were right.

So we abandoned this part of the logo but kept the hand drawn Market House. We call it the ‘Wobbly House’. It’s not perfect in its form and that’s intentional. I mentioned earlier that I’m not a great sketcher but they really wanted to embrace that and loved the quirkiness of it. So instead of a perfectly digitally drawn, straight-lined graphic (I really do love symmetry), they asked me to redraw it and hence the ‘Wobbly House’ was born. It embraces creativity, personality, individuality and everything handmade. Something that The Trust (and Enfield Market) wholeheartedly represent.

E is for Enfield

All of the three logos feature an underlined E which represents Enfield. It adds to the distinctiveness of the logo without getting complicated.

The three logos

So there you have it. A brief synopsis of how the three logos were born. Take a look at the position of The Market House on The Trust’s logo. Note that it’s situated right about where the Trust is actually based on the Old Enfield Parish map.

Thanks

Major thanks to The Trust for awarding me the contract. It’s been a helluva ride and one that I’m not quite ready to get off just yet. Big thanks to Ellie Gill, (Mrs Market) – lover of all things market related, consultant and visionary who has been the rather lovely thorn in my side for the past two and a half months and who charmingly labelled me a ‘brand bitch’. She has been the main spearhead for the project and has been planning and imagining the Enfield Market relaunch for way longer than I’ve been part of the project. Last week it was wonderful to see the market come to life and see the dreams and aspirations for it come to fruition.

Have a read of the follow up blog which focuses on the graphics and designs used to promote the newly relaunched Enfield Market on the 1st October.

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2 Comments

Hey Kareen, I love the way you’ve explained your thought process and even the reasons for the font choice. Lovely write-up, well laid out blog and really inspiring. Wobbly house really works – and that’s from an OCD symmetry freak too 😉 Congrats on the contract!